{"id":5273,"date":"2026-03-06T08:08:45","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T13:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5273"},"modified":"2026-03-06T08:08:45","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T13:08:45","slug":"under-pontius-pilate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/06\/under-pontius-pilate\/","title":{"rendered":"Under Pontius Pilate"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a>
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Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.<\/em>
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Seventy-three years ago today, on March 6, 1953, the front page of The Indianapolis Star <\/em>announced the death of Soviet premier Josef Stalin.
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Stalin is widely regarded as the most heinous dictator in a century that became infamous for genocidal despots.\u00a0
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During his three decades of totalitarian rule, Stalin is thought to have ordered the deaths of at least 65 million people, most of them his own countrymen.\u00a0In his epic work Stalin: Breaker of Nations<\/em>, Robert Conquest asserts that Stalin personally approved the execution of 70% of the members of the Communist Party.\u00a0
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A mere suggestion of disloyalty was sufficient to send even a close friend to the firing squad.
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Stalin was notoriously insecure.\u00a0Once, when he entered a concert hall, everyone present sprang to their feet, applauding madly.\u00a0Now\u2026who would be the first person courageous enough to sit down?\u00a0After many minutes, an older man finally became tired and retook his seat.\u00a0The police took note of the man and arrested him the following day.\u00a0
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The long-awaited death of Stalin was big news, indeed.\u00a0It deserved the primary headline in Indianapolis.
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Something much quieter also happened on March 6, 1953.\u00a0A young Indianapolis couple named Walter and Phyllis Vonnegut became parents of a little girl.\u00a0The Star<\/em> noted the next day on a back page that her name was Mary Susan.
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I happen to care about March 6, but not because of Josef Stalin.
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Stalin is part of history.\u00a0But Mary Sue Vonnegut is part of my<\/em> history.\u00a0Later this year we will celebrate our 51st<\/sup> wedding anniversary.
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History shows up, seemingly out of nowhere, in the Apostles\u2019 Creed. Besides Jesus, two other figures appear within the Creed\u2019s recitation of core Christian beliefs. One is Mary, Jesus\u2019 mother. The other is Pontius Pilate. Mary takes center stage at the beginning of Jesus\u2019 life. Pilate arrives on the scene, briefly but dramatically, at the very end.
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Think of the high-profile names that might have been included in the Creed but are nowhere to be found: Peter, James, John, Paul, Mary Magdalene, Caiaphas, Herod, or one of the Roman emperors.
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The early church opted instead for a mid-level Roman official who, by almost anyone\u2019s assessment, made a serious mess of his job.
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Pontius Pilate has been described as a thug with a toga. He was tabbed by the Emperor Tiberius to serve as procurator of Judea, a role he filled between 26 and 36 A.D. Historians believe that Jesus appeared before him in the spring of A.D. 30.
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According to Pilate\u2019s contemporary, the Jewish historian Philo, he was \u201cnaturally inflexible, a blend of self-will and relentlessness,\u201d known for \u201cthe briberies, the insults, the robberies, the outrages, the wanton injustices, the executions without trial constantly repeated, the ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty.\u201d
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It remains a mystery why the emperor would choose such a candidate for anger management to govern Judea, of all places \u2013 a backwater imperial province long known as a simmering pot of revolutionary fervor.
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Despite regular warnings not to provoke the Jews, Pilate couldn\u2019t seem to help himself.
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He confiscated money from the Temple treasury in order to pursue a pet building project, the construction of an aqueduct. He likewise authorized a cohort of soldiers to enter the Temple mount carrying imperial standards. Since each standard bore the likeness of the emperor, earnest Jews saw this as a brazen attempt to defile God\u2019s holy ground with idols.
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In each case, rioting was narrowly averted.
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Half a dozen years after Jesus\u2019 crucifixion, Pilate ordered the slaughter of a group of Samaritans on religious pilgrimage. That was a bridge too far, even for an empire that had long before accommodated itself to violence. Pilate was recalled to Rome, never to be heard from again.
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It\u2019s worth noting that the four Gospel writers, in their accounts of Jesus\u2019 appearance before Pilate, are somewhat gentler in their assessment of the procurator.
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He is presented as curious and confused about Jesus. His wife hastens to warn him that she has had a troubled dream concerning this Galilean prophet.\u00a0
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In the end, however, he defaults to the cynicism that has always been part of his playbook. He works the crowd gathered outside the Praetorium. \u201cShall I crucify your king?\u201d They respond, \u201cCrucify him! We have no king but Caesar.\u201d To compel a Jewish mob to abandon the kingship of Yahweh in favor of Emperor Tiberius was a political miracle almost too good to be true.
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Why, in the end, does Pontius Pilate appear in the Apostles\u2019 Creed?
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He is proof that God the Son entered history \u2013 real history, stamped with a real name of a real government functionary who appeared in the empire\u2019s official records.
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The narrative about Jesus, in other words, is not a myth. It is not a campfire story.
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Real history has heroes, villains, and everything in between.
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Our call is not merely to be students of things that happened in first century Palestine. It\u2019s to let God become part of our own history \u2013 to let him enter our hearts in such a way that we experience his love not only as a story about someone else, but as an account of our own minutes and our own days.
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That would definitely be worth a banner headline.
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.\u00a0Seventy-three years ago today, on March 6, 1953, the front page of The Indianapolis Star announced the death of Soviet premier Josef Stalin.\u00a0Stalin is… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1080,3,1061],"class_list":["post-5273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apostles-creed","tag-history","tag-pontius-pilate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5275,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5273\/revisions\/5275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}